Tagged: Richard Branson

Try to find someone on LinkedIn who acknowledges his inexperience. OK, you can find a few, yet out of 150 million+ users, rare is the individual who openly claims his lack of practical knowledge.

Until now.

Thanks to Sir Richard Branson, we see that a dearth of experience is less of a problem, and more a path to advancement.

In a recent Q & A at Entrepreneur, the chair of the Virgin Group debunks the stigma of inexperience. He writes:

A lack of experience does not have to be a liability — it can be an asset. It is something you should play up when you discuss your ideas with prospective investors, partners and employees.

He drives his point home with a personal story:

I have always used my own and my team’s lack of experience to our advantage. In fact, at our first venture, Student magazine, we used our newcomer status to secure great interviews and generate publicity — people were excited about our new project and wanted to get involved. Our inexperience fed our restless enthusiasm for trying new things, which became part of our core mission.

Don’t you love the way he turns something potentially mortifying into an opportunity, and seizes it outright? Perhaps it’s time for you to come out at work with your inexperience.

As Branson points out, you have nothing to hide, and a lot of business to gain.

We’ve covered the subject of revealing your dyslexic nature at work before, yet a book full of new supporting evidence is prompting us to get excited about it all over again. Doctors Brock L. Eide and Fernette F. Eide have written The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain (Hudson Street Press, 2011). Mm… the title basically says it.

[People with dyslexia] can excel at “big picture” thinking. [They] frequently prefer thinking in narrative form, a proclivity that makes them natural storytellers, and they tend to have exceptional spatial navigation skills, visualizing 3-D structures with ease.

Turns out that in addition to film and TV star Whoopi Goldberg, novelist Anne Rice, actor Danny Glover and entrepreneur Richard Branson live and work with the strengths that dyslexia brings. The Doctors Eide offer that:

It is time to stop classifying dyslexia as a learning disability and start appreciating that different brain-wiring patterns allow people to process information in unique ways. When it comes to learning, they argue, there is no good or bad, right or wrong, only a difference in style, which should be fostered rather than corrected.

Right on! The folks we’ve referenced in this post have flourished not in spite of their learning style, but because of it. Again from the Scientific American Mind article, you see:

Being dyslexic allowed them to break from conventional ways of thinking to dream of fantastic new worlds and create alternative solutions to vexing problems.

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